UCLA

The United States nation-state’s approach to refugee resettlement created a situation of social service dependency for Chinese-Vietnamese migrants. This study focuses on the children of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees who acted as intermediaries between the state and their supposedly less linguistically and socially fluent elders. Through the narratives of my interviewees it is clear that the ubiquity of social services led to their early parentification in a social welfare system that did not provide linguistically and culturally responsive services. This meant that at times multiple families depended on my interviewees to secure housing, food, healthcare, and even citizenship statuses. Despite efforts to narrate themselves at upwardly mobile model minority figures, my interviewees’ efforts to redefine success are driven by the precarity that they experienced as children.